China builds world’s most powerful supercomputer

China has topped the list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with the new 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight.

Situated in the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, it is twice as fast as the previous leader; Tianhe-2, also from China.

At full power, it can perform around 93,000 trillion calculations per second and is three times more efficient as Tianhe-2.

Due to the difficulties involved in writing software that can take advantage of the 10.5 million processing cores, the Sunway TaihuLight will be restricted to weather forecasting, data analytics and advanced manufacturing, while running on a Linux based operating system.

10 years ago, China only had 28 systems listed on the list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. Now, they lead with 167, narrowly pipping the US, who have 165.

However, the US has four supercomputers in the top 10 of the Top500 list, while China has two which currently occupy the top two places. The top ten is rounded out by supercomputers from Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia.